


Finding Angels in Dark Places

by wispenwillows



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Politics, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 08:04:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6974656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wispenwillows/pseuds/wispenwillows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's Paris' new political darling and she's the upstart who threw an egg at his head. Nothing good could possibly come out of this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Finding Angels in Dark Places

* * *

_she dwells with beauty—beauty that must die;_

* * *

**i.**

The first time they see each other is when she throws an egg at his face. Her aim is not perfect and he is moving quickly through the crowd, but Eponine is satisfied when his golden hair is covered with similarly golden yolk that is dripping onto his golden self and the night is lit with quick flashes of golden light as photographers capture the look of perfect disbelief on his face (eyes wide, primrose mouth slightly ajar, hands half-raised). She doesn’t even mind when she feels the black-gloved grip of the security personnel around her wrists, squeezing her so tightly she can hear her bones grinding into dust against each other. And on her face there is a grin of victory.

Eponine doesn’t even mind that she’s jailed for the night, and stares with pleasant placidity up at the fluorescent lights around which a menagerie of insects circle while outside, Montparnasse is trying to scrape up the money to pay for her way out. She’s done it, and she’s pleased, and jail is quite nice, after all, compared to the acid heat of her apartment. (It is summer, and it is hot in Paris, France, and she doesn’t have the money to afford much in the way of cooling, unless propping open the windows with a stick and praying for a soft breeze to bathe her in a sea of relief while she folds her ratty old tank top up to below an even rattier old bra so that the windowsill digs physical reminders of her existence into her skin counts as central air conditioning.)

When Montparnasse comes for her in the morning she gives a laugh in response to his curiosity and presses a swollen kiss to his mouth while her hands creep to the back pocket of his jeans and filch a Marlboro. Later they will smoke it together, her lipstick staining his mouth and smearing across her face as they exchange mouthfuls of smoke, her exhale becoming his inhale becoming his exhale becoming her inhale as she ponders how much she didn’t love this boy, who always strove towards gentility. (She has little use for gentility.)

“Why’d you do it?” he asks, one hand fiddling with the strap of her shirt while the other tangles in the dark of her hair.

“Hmm?” she turns towards him, boredom sitting restless in her eyes. She is more interested in the interplay of the light upon her skin as she holds a brown arm up to the day, shifting it this way and that, watching how the hair on her arm turns to molten gold as if the sun had set her on fire. And she thinks how it looks like yolk, and that tugs at the corners of her mouth. (Bastard had it coming.)

“Why’d you chuck an egg at him?” His breath tastes like ashes and she leans in for a lungful of self-destruction.

“I felt like it,” she says lightly, looping too-skinny arms around his too-skinny neck. They are both so breakable, the two of them. It’s a wonder they haven’t yet managed to smash each other to smithereens.

“You felt like throwing an egg at Paris’ new political darling?”

“Mmm.”

“I would have thought you would like him,” Montparnasse says. (His fingers edge under her top, and she lets them stay there, for now, because she likes the feel of his callouses and how gentle his rough hands can be.) “He’s all socially aware and young-old idealistic. And bourgeois. You have a weakness for bourgeois boys.”

“You thought wrong, then,” she informs him, and that is the whole problem right there, isn’t it? 'Parnasse thought a lot of things about 'Ponine, but the things 'Parnasse thought were often wrong, and 'Ponine did not often care enough to correct him. “Trust me. I know his type, touring the slums like he can _save_ us. Saint-Michel needs more than some pretty rich boy weaned on his papa’s money. And he can take his interference and the idea that he knows what’s best for us and he can shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

“You think he’s pretty?” Montparnasse asks, and there is hurt in his eyes.

“He’s decent enough,” says Eponine as she pretends not to see.

The headlines the next day call her a potentially dangerous menace and analyse her life from birth to present. And she buys the paper and tacks it on her wall as a badge of honour. But what they don't realise is that this person they call Eponine Jondrette is a fabrication who swirled into existence at the age of eleven, and that she had never had a childhood.

 

* * *

_and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips_

* * *

**ii.**

The second time they see each other he is attending a charity dinner for his Project Saint-Michel and she is standing sullen outside, a sign of protest. There is sweat beading on her forehead and dripping into her eyes, and she has on secondhand sneakers and a pair of cut-off denims while he breezes by in a tailored Armani suit that is sharp at the edges and cuts away at her last nerve of patience.

His _Project Saint-Michel_ is an urban renewal project which sought to channel money into the slums of Paris and – in particular – to her neighbourhood. In his fancy speeches he said he wanted to use the money to fund local initiative projects and education but she sees through this. He is transparent as plastic film and twice as flimsy. He wants to be their saviour, as all men of his type want to be their saviours.

Saint-Michel doesn’t want a saviour. Saint-Michel doesn’t _need_ a saviour. If Saint-Michel needed any saving, it was _from_ men like him, who would pretty up the neighbourhood to paint themselves up into gold and ivory statuettes and clean up the dirty corners of their conscience while driving up rent prices and driving out old tenants who have no place else to go.

All things considered, she thinks an egg to the head was letting him have it easy.

Night comes rolling in like a great sea wave, curling away all traces of lingering day and Eponine lowers her sign for a cigarette. She fumbles in the front pockets of her plaid shirt for a lighter, which she knows she put in her pocket this morning because she never leaves home without it. (It wasn’t anything special, a dented neon pink number she’d picked up at the convenience store down the street and which leaked dangerously all over her best clothes, but she’d spent one blissful Sunday doodling on it in permanent marker with the cute boy who lived next door.)

Someone offers her a light, and she murmurs unintelligible thanks before straining her neck forward to meet the flame. It is a silver filigree lighter that looks about as heavy and ornate as it does expensive, and she does some quick calculations in her head for its value. (Can you tack a price on beauty? She doesn’t know. But you can tack a price on commodities, because this sort of beauty can be bought and sold, and food is worth more than twice its weight in gold.)

She knows even before she lifts her head that it’s him, and she drags her dark gaze to meet his.

“I’m all out of eggs, if that’s what you’re after,” she says after a period of careful study of his face. She has seen it on her careworn television and on the flat screens of the bars she frequents. It is different in the flesh – so much more closed off and inaccessible. She wonders if he is a man who will only speak if there is a distance between himself and others, and she would pity him if she weren’t filled with disgust. And she wonders what he’s coming up to her for, and whether or not he is about to make her life very difficult, because she doesn’t doubt he has more than enough resources to.

His mouth twists into a smile, rosebud mouth going all cherry-coloured with the way he’s pressing them so tightly, and he says, “I won't press charges, I swear. I’m just not very used to not being well-liked.” And she can understand it, because he has the face of a conquering army. She wonders if, had he existed two – three – hundred years ago, would he have been one of those crusaders who marched into the homeland from which she is now so distantly divorced, convinced he was shouldering the white man’s burden and liberating the swarms of the _uncivilised_.

(He would be at the front of the line.)

“You’ve chosen quite the profession for one so unused to hatred. _Career politician_.” She spits the words.

He flinches as if burned, and she thinks  that if he is so easily singed then perhaps he should not have chosen to play with fire, to handle the flame. Her fire is red, and rises often to a vicious roar that could tear you apart, the earthly fire that goes up in a passionate blaze of glory. She does not know that he is fire too, but he burns blue-white, to the point of being ice cold, the sort of flame that fuels the casual cruelty of the stars and it burns somewhere in the pit of his stomach. She burns, caresses you in a symphony of sweetbitter pain. He consumes you whole. (She knows, he glows, she burns, he yearns.)

“Nevertheless,” he says, his eyes steady and fixed on her face, “I would like to know any objections you have – or had – about Project Saint-Michel, given that you feel strongly enough about it to assault me.”

“Saint-Michel doesn’t need your brand of assistance.” She bites off the ends of her words and thinks of how lightly he uses the word assault. When she throws an egg (one, singular) at him, it is assault. She won’t deny that it is. But what do they call the welts that blossom into flowers up and down her body the day after a protest that meets no uncertain end at the butts of police batons? What do they call the stinging pain and the eyes that don’t stop watering after she has sucked in a lungful of tear gas? Oh, yes: _Justice_.

“Saint-Michel is a hellhole!” he snaps, waspish. “Don’t tell me you don’t think the area is some sort of Arcadia that needs no reformation.”

“Did you hear me say that Saint-Michel doesn’t need to change? Did I give thanks for the fact that the roof is collapsing in over my head? Did I say that I enjoyed living in poverty? But the fact remains, little politician man, that you don’t have the slightest idea how to help us. All you’re doing is creating a place where we won't be able to live. We’re going to be a new fad, and once your funding runs out, the time limit of allocation of funds on your law has been reached, you people will go and call our problems fixed and when we collapse because you’ve given us programs without infrastructure, initiatives without base, it will be our fault because we have wasted when really it was you who didn’t understand.”

“Then why don’t _you_ enact some change?” and the expression on his face lets her know that he knows it is a mistake the second the words slip from his mouth.

Eponine is furious in the way summer storms are furious, in the way that _this soon shall pass_ , because anger is temporary, though her hatred is forever. But she clings to her anger like a lifeline, because hatred doesn’t bubble to the surface and course through her veins but rather burrows itself in darkness and secret places. “I would love to. Though I don’t know if you’ve noticed with the way you’re swimming in your daddy’s money, but change don’t come easy and not everyone is able to do it like you do,” she snarls, and she digs her ragged nails into the rough bed of her palm and her heels into the mangled body of the unsmoked cigarette, which she had dropped when she looked up to see him.

“Take this as your final warning, little politician man. Cease and desist, because you and people like you are making our lives harder to live. And trust me when I say I am vengeful, and every time my life is made harder by your ‘Project Saint-Michel,’ I will pay you back in trouble tenfold.”

She turns and leaves him with the taste of sand on his lips. Her last words (“Take _care_ , Monsieur Enjolras”) haunt him for a week but smarts for much longer.

* * *

_bidding adieu; and aching pleasure nigh,_

* * *

**iii.**

The third time they see each other it is he who seeks her. She hears hollow knocking at her door and for a second she thinks it’s the sound of her heart hitting her ribcage (a physical impossibility, but a pretty image of emptiness for the hollow girl and her hollow body).

It is a Saturday and the sun shines through windows streaked with the grime of the streets and she is annoyed because really, who is awake this early? Her head aches and she stumbles from bed, almost tripping over the blanket that has twined itself between her two legs like an affectionate cat. She pulls on a tank top and shorts and runs a hand through hair that is probably overdue for a wash and Eponine walks blearily towards the door with half a mind to tear to shreds the complete asshole on the other side and half a mind to ignore whoever it is and slink back into bed.

Except that the bed is stained with her sweat and disgusting to get back into.

 _Fine_.

She opens the door to the face of an angel and she is as quick to slam it shut again, but he’s using his foot as a doorjamb and as much as she wishes he could dematerialise, he stays as solid as marble. She doesn’t ask how he found her – he has people and she hardly keeps a low profile. She doesn’t ask him why he’s here. She doesn’t ask him anything, because she does not want him to know she wants to know.

“I have a proposition for you,” Enjolras says. She breathes in sharply because it is morning and she is hungover and her supply of patience is incredibly limited and all she really wants to do is get a glass of orange juice and flip through a magazine and look with longing at the ornate dresses that grace the pages of secondhand magazines that her friend Cosette gives to her. Eponine imagines that in another life she could have been a fashion designer. (In another life, there would be justice, and she would have custody of her brother already.)

“No, I will not apologise to you in front of the media in exchange for a much-needed sum of money, no, I will not become your wanton mistress of the night, no, I will not let you bum a cig off of me, no, there is no more ramen left over from yesterday– does one of these answers satisfy your proposition?” she intones sarcastically.

He invites himself into her house. She’s impressed by the way he fills up space, looking so big in an apartment so small. She always scuttles around corners, dwarfed by nature of her being so very sickly small, but he is tall, and healthy, and bears around himself an air of authority, as if he belongs in the spaces he hews out for himself, as if the world must always change to accommodate him. She walks into the kitchen to pour him some weak, watered-down, day-old tea.

“I've been thinking about what you said to me that week,” he calls.

“Oh?” Despite herself, her interest is piqued. Eponine ambles back in with two cups filled less with tea than grassy lukewarm water and shoves one into his hand. “A politician. _thinking_. How refreshing.”

He rolls his eyes and sips his tea and pulls a face but, to his credit, he doesn’t make snide commentary on her snide commentary. Instead, he says, “You were right. I – know – nothing of how to fix the ills of our society. I thought knowledge of them was enough, I thought acting logically and rationally to countermand the effects of poverty was enough but – you’re right.”

“Do you think this absolves you of your little project’s existence? Do you think the money you’ve collected from people is going to redistribute itself, then?” she snaps at him, but she’ll admit to a little surprise (only if prompted to). Well-intentioned lawmakers like him are two-a-penny on the streets before the _assemblee nationale_ ; she’s heard them yammer on like the droning of a hive of bees often enough, seen them with their fancy leather suitcases and their hands stuffed full of speeches and dreams (mockeries of dreams, dreams built on phantoms, dreams built on pillars of sand and dust and ashes).

But this one – _listens_? She's is used to not being heard, to being willfully ignored, shoved and stuffed in the back of some secretary’s file cabinet, to be sorted under ‘undesirables.’ She’s caused trouble, she knows it, and she knows people don’t like the way she couldn’t just be satisfied. This was…new.

“You’re a pain,” he informs her.

Okay, this bit isn’t new.

“You said that day that I don’t know how to fix things.” She nods. “You said that I’ve not experienced oppression firsthand, and I will grant you that it’s true. The things you mentioned – Saint-Michel not being able to sustain changes if we treat the symptoms and not the disease – I have a friend who’d enjoy that metaphor – and I wanted to ask if you would consider leading the initiative with me. ”

Eponine’s eyes widen and she presses a hand to her mouth to stifle the gasp that threatens to soar out. (This must be a trick of some kind.)

“I need some time to think about this,” she says, biting her lip. (He pursues justice in those conventional ways; she is more oblique.) Her voice does not waver, though her hands do shake.

Enjolras says, “It’s just as well. I need some time convincing my colleagues my judgement hasn’t been impaired. I’m sure you’ll know where to find me.” He shifts his weight and waits for her to get up off the couch to show him out of the house. (Why? The door is right there and she can’t be bothered and it isn’t as if they’re friends.)

After he leaves she feels like she has been left in the wake of a whirlwind, and she doesn’t know what to think.

* * *

_turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:_

* * *

**iv.**

Seven days later he finds a folded note sitting on his desk. It is stained with watery tea (there is a slight scent and a faint stain and both the colour and the smell bring the trinity of dark hair dark skin dark eyes to float in the waters of his consciousness). He does not know where it comes from; no one had seen it delivered, and his assistant cautions him against it with the words, “The last time you forsook security for efficiency you ended up with chicken embryo in your hair.”

Enjolras smiles at her and unfolds the note anyway.

Inside, she has scrawled in a nearly illegible hand,

_– you’ve got yourself a deal, m. politician man. i expect to be compensated. –_

He smiles.

* * *

_ay, in the very temple of delight_

* * *

**v.**

Eponine shows up to the first meeting in an old _Paris je t’aime_ sweatshirt she’d picked up from some street vendor for five euros during her first few days in Paris and a pair of jeans that covers less than it reveals. She’s horribly out of place among people dressed in sleek suits and dress heels. (She will play this off as if it doesn’t bother her if it kills her to do it.)

She walks with a swagger up to Enjolras and waits for him to notice her.

It isn’t until the room quiets down and someone nudges him aggressively that he is made aware of her presence and he pauses in the middle of his speech about access to resources to greet her.

“You came,” he says, like it’s any surprise that she should have come. She doesn’t want in on any sort of saviour project, but the idea of diverting his abundant resources into the actual betterment of her neighbourhood and then, one day, this nation – well. it’s too tantalising an opportunity.

She nods at everyone and scans their faces and Enjolras seems to realise that introductions are generally the thing to be done when you are the mutual acquaintance of two unrelated bodies.

“This is Combeferre,” he says, wrapping an arm around the waist of a tall, sandy-haired young man with mild eyes. “And this is Feuilly, one of our consultants.” The dark-haired young man who found himself pushed out from the back of the crowd nodded a little hesitantly at her. “He’s a school friend of mine; he himself through college even though he grew up close to Saint-Michel. I thought that he might be as familiar as you are with poverty, and he's a damn fine role model.”

Because of course, Eponine is far from a good role model. A frequent disturber of the peace who steals cigarettes and candy-shaped barrettes from corner stores. Who wants to be like her? Dirty, dogged, disgusting. Nothing like this genteel, respectable person who is the very picture of capitalist success (“Lifted himself up by the bootstraps,” they would say. “A true success story, a testament to the equality of our nation.” But there are twenty Eponines for one of Feuilly. Whatever. She doesn’t need gentility).

He lists off the others for her – Courfeyrac, the pretty girl who gives her a confused smile, Joly, whose face is brimming over with good cheer, a welcome reprieve of the sour and dour of the rest of the room, Prouvaire, the journalist attaché to the project, and so on.

Soon enough they have bored of gawking, and everyone turns back to what they were doing before – looking at Enjolras with a mixture of awe and expectation, and Eponine stands a little to the side, cocking her head and waiting to hear what the politician-man has to say. He takes his time, he shuffles his notecards, and she notes how everyone is waiting with bated breath on him. He would have made a good performer, she thinks, in another life. The way he holds and commands attention is something she’s always aspired to. But Eponine is a wisp of a thing, and she must scream and make a display and throw eggs at people to get them to notice.

He does it like it’s natural, like it’s second nature to him. She does not know if she should resent or admire him for that, does not know if she should shun or admire him.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter. She’s here for Place Saint-Michel. She is here for justice. Nothing else.

* * *

_veil’d melancholy has her sovran shrine,_

* * *

**vi.**

They have the television on and some pundit is talking about something-or-other (it’s always the same) but no one’s paying much attention to it. Eponine sits in the frigid office in a tank top and shorts, absentmindedly twirling a pen between her long fingers.

She’s still uncomfortable in the confines of this big office building with its air conditioning that turns summer to winter and night into day and she’s still uncomfortable around these people who glance at her from the corners of their eyes as if she’s some caged animal (even while masquerading as _Les Amis de l’Abaisse_ ), but it’s been two weeks and she has been productive, and she is – more or less – pleased. It’s better than the long days alternating between lounging around rifling through magazines and working til dawn at the bar down the street.

Eponine chews on the insides of her cheeks, hollow face becoming even more gaunt as she taps the pen on the notepad. It’s half-filled with notes from their last meeting and it’s pretentious and it’s bureaucratic and she’s tired of it, but it’s power that she’d never have if she left. So she stays. and she jots down a few ideas – programs she wished had been there for her when she was a child, incentives for community-based small businesses to set up shop, free classes on the weekends ranging from how to file for a loan, entrepreneurship, to ballet (another secret childhood dream) and arts and crafts. Tenant unions, community centres, zoning petitions. Partnerships with schools, volunteer babysitters - she’s smiling when Bahorel comes storming in with the news.

“It’s worse than utter condemnation,” he says, slamming a fist down onto a table. Eponine, already fidgety, jumps a mile.  “It’s utter dismissal. Look at this!”

The office scampers to crowd around the newspaper. Eponine follows a little after, but squeezes through their cracks and crevices to the front, where she might more easily read over Bahorel’s shoulder.

He’s right.

And the tone is worse than dismissive, it’s condescending. Which, really, Eponine wouldn’t have minded if they were condescending to something worth being condescending about – the discomfort Les Amis exhibit around poor people they can’t make act like long-suffering wretches who they will rescue from the dregs of sewer to be washed out at sea, their messianic attitude, as if they personally are the second coming for Place Saint-Michel, their inability to recognise Saint-Michel's agency, as if everyone who lived in the slums was an automaton trapped by a system they couldn't challenge and wouldn't understand. The way they treat Feuilly, the acceptable one, versus herself, the one who won’t let them get away with anything.

It isn’t that. It’s the very idea that a group of young people have no idea of their convictions, the possibility of giving people like Eponine a future that isn’t characterised by torment and a constant scrambling to force ends to meet when they clearly won’t, the concept of social justice that makes the reporter so snide and sneering. And it’s at that point that Eponine decides she would very much like to slap the stylistic smirk out of the writer’s fingers.

Because it may be presumptuous to doubt the sincerity of Project Saint-Michel’s intentions, but this – this utter denial that Saint-Michel exists in a wretched system, exists in between a rock and a hard place – this is cruelty. She fumes.

When they go back to their desks she shoves her things aside and takes out her laptop and in tomorrow’s newspaper there is a strongly-worded letter to the editor that seems simultaneously to care too much about the journalist’s “complete and utter ignorance of the social realities that people who exist outside of his friend pool of entitled man-children who believe that the world should cater only to them” and care too little about “his blathering opinions of matters of which he is clearly very uninformed.” No one at headquarters needs to ask who wrote the letter. The long, rambling run-ons and the idiosyncratic phrasing speaks loudly enough to the identity of the writer.

Oh, the letter isn’t written particularly well – Enjolras would have written one more easy to read, full of references to history and law. Combeferre would have written one with a beautifully cohesive structure, an internal system of impeccable logic. Prouvaire’s writing would tantalise, astound, delight, float off the corners of the mind and wrap around one’s heart. But Eponine’s lack of recognisable structure doesn’t find a parallel in logic. It is emotional, eviscerating.

Like she is.

There is coffee and a blond young man sitting on her desk when she walks in and pulls on a trench coat (because god, no one in this office seems to want to raise the temperature to above freezing). She slides behind it and wraps her hands around the coffee. The cup is scalding hot because Enjolras doesn’t believe in styrofoam (Eponine thinks it’s ridiculous to condemn small businesses with not enough money to purchase alternatives for using styrofoam, and less ridiculous to hold corporations up the a standard of trying not to contribute so much to global warming), and her hands feel like static on an old television set, but the warmth courses through her body.

“I saw your letter to the editor,” Enjolras says as she busies herself by taking out her notepads and the seemingly endless rainbow of pens she owns.

Her hand is on the phone already by the time she snorts, "I’m sure I don’t know what you’re referring to but I assure you it was not for your benefit.”

“Of course not!” he replies, shocked and a little hurt. “I just wanted to ask if you wanted to present your points at the press conference next week.”

She flicks her eyes up at him and his look asks if she really thinks so lowly of him and she looks away because the worst kinds of melomania begin with learning to read the music of someone’s gaze.

"I – um. I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” she says slowly, fixing her attention on the little flowers she’s doodling along the bottom edge of the page. “I’m not very good at writing, and I don’t think your friends would be too happy about it. They don’t like me very much.”

“They do, though,” he protests.

Eponine scoffs. “Have you seen how on-edge they are around me? They’re terrified of me.”

“Terrified, maybe. You have to concede that you’re maybe a little intimidating. You did throw an egg at my face; it’s incredible that _I’m_ not more intimidated by you. But even if they did dislike you – which they don’t – they admire you, Eponine – but even if they did. Even if they’re everything you think they are – which you can’t confirm or deny, because you haven’t spent any time with them – oh, don’t act like you interact with them in any meaningful way – why should that be a deterrent? Don’t you believe in the good you’re doing?”

“I never believe in the good I’m doing until someone from the community tells me I’m doing good, monsieur.”

“And you’ll never get that opportunity unless you put yourself in a position with the potential to receive that acknowledgement. You said you didn’t believe in this – project, charity, whatever you think this is – because we’re _not_ from Place Saint-Michel, because most of us haven’t been poor, because we’re coming in from outside the community with no knowledge of the realities of your community.”

“My stance on the issue hasn’t changed,” she says, drawing away from his increasing proximity. “Get to what you’re trying to say.”

“Well, I don’t believe in projects like that, either. I’ve been thinking of what you said almost constantly since you’ve said it and I certainly don’t want this project to ‘save’ anyone; I didn’t set out to convince the mayor and the council of Paris to help fund this project because I wanted anyone to feel grateful to me, because I wanted to hold power or sway over people. I want to help, but I don’t want to do it in an invasive way.

“You’re part of the community. You’re the one with the ideas that come from experience, and from knowledge. Place Saint-Michel is your home, not mine, and if this is the case then you’re the only fitting representative, you’re the only one who should have that right to speak. If you need help writing, I’m here, and Jehan’s here, and Combeferre would be – I’m sure – more than willing to help. If you need clothes to wear Courf has a closet that can rival Marie Antoinette’s. But it’s your ideas which are important, which are pertinent and relevant and – valid.”

“Nice to know even heartless politicians can be made to see the error of their ways,” she teases lightly, and promises him that she’ll think on it, if he gives her time. And when he pushes himself from her desk to saunter over to Lesgle, who’s wrangling with sums, Eponine slumps back into her chair and thinks how pathetic it is that a girl who doesn’t fear jail or judgement (divine or otherwise), who dances and tends bars for a living should be so petrified by public speaking.

But there it is, all the same.

* * *

_though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue_

* * *

**vii.**

In the end, she does it. She’s dressed in some of Courfeyrac’s clothes (the other girl offers to take her shopping, or to tailor the blouse and the skirt so they won’t hang off of Eponine’s body like a potato sack, but the expense is extravagant and so is her guilt) because they have similar styles and proportions, and it goes well – surprisingly well – even though her tongue is numb at times and her eyes smart from the flashing of the cameras that reminds her so much of wailing police sirens.

Afterwards, when Eponine is choking down water like a pilgrim come recently out of the desert and sweating out nearly as much as she is pouring in, and she is surrounded by a herd of chittering people who sound more bird than human, Enjolras hangs on the outskirts of the crowd, alternating between lowering his gaze and sneaking looks at her.

It’s a shame, really, that someone who is so good at weaving words into speeches and thoughts into action, who is so good at talking to those who are above and below him, is so utterly lousy at approaching others as equals. He wets his lips and laces his fingers together and thank god she walks up to him because he had been thinking of walking away.

“Join me for a celebratory drink?” he asks, a little breathless, both hands fisted in the denim of his jeans. She thinks he means beer, his intent is coffee.

“Why not?” There’s a smile in her voice and a laugh and a lightness in the way she stands and, as they bid their colleagues goodbye, a grin playing coy on the corners of her mouth, as well. He hasn't seen her like this before.

Eponine takes quick, mincing steps (the heels are her own, bought with a gift card Cosette gave her for her birthday two years ago), trying to keep pace with his loping stride.  

“I can’t believe it went so smoothly,” Eponine giggles. “I didn’t trip up there, not once. I almost expected to make a fool of myself and everyone on the team up there, you know, and I know they were scared of that happening too, but I only stumbled once and bit my tongue but it didn’t hurt that much and it hardly even bled.”

“There’s that, at least,” and he smiles, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “We’re here.”

The little coffee shop is a by-the-way fair trade place he stumbled into when he was a grad student, he tells her as he holds the door open and she walks under the arch of his arm. “They make a killer macchiato.”

“Must cost a small fortune,” Eponine comments, looking around the place. It’s not – swanky – but it’s crisp and clean and no-nonsense, with small touches of elegance––small gilt fleur-de-lis on the molding, tables embedded with flecks of gold, a menu that boasts organically sourced, cruelty-free coffee beans. Avoidance is usually her best policy when it comes to fair-trade prices, in part because of price and in part because of attitude and in part because of the holier-than-thou people who make up so large a part of their patronage, but she’s attracted to this brightness.

Enjolras shrugs. “We must all try our best to do better,” he says. “If it is so within our means.”

Eponine orders a café miel and insists on paying for it herself, though he tries to fight her for it (no man is a match for her nails) and Enjolras orders his coffee black.

By the time the coffee’s arrived they’ve settled into a small corner by the window. Eponine has her back to the corner, an eye fixed on the street, and two hands locked around her coffee. “What’s that that’s got you so worried, little politician man?” she asks, taking note of the manila folder he takes from his briefcase.

“It’s nothing, really,” he says. “I knew from the beginning this was a likely possibility.” He runs a well-manicured hand through his tangle of curls and huffs. “I wish I had the time and the resources to sit down with these people and tell them why they’re wrong, to make them see the error of their ways, make them realise that every life has inherent worth and value and everyone deserves to live and be well-fed and have opportunities, no matter how much they are pushed to the fringes of society, but –”

“You’re not magic, you know,” she reminds him softly. He looks so tired. She dips her head to slurp at the foam and comes up with a small white mustache. “You don’t have the ability to go ‘round to every person who doesn’t agree with you and hold hour-long debates with them. and even if you did, you have no way of guaranteeing they’ll agree with you once you’re done. People are strange, and set in their ways. And if they don’t approve of what we’re about we won’t mind them and plow right through their consternation. We don’t owe anyone the time or the energy to teach them empathy.”

She plucks the envelope out of his hands and peeks inside. Several phrases jump out at her – socialism, a waste of government resources, the first step towards the eventual collapse of good, solid, traditional France* – and she scoffs at Enjolras, who takes a sip of his coffee and winces at the bitterness.

“You’re going to listen to someone who clearly has no idea what socialism is, who is too lazy to have done any research about Project Saint-Michel lest they find out most of its funding comes from private donors and only a few public programs, and who uses the slippery-slope fallacy with all the tenacity of a three year old who thinks the world is going to end if they don’t have ice cream? Surely this can’t be the first time you’ve gotten unpleasant letters.”

“It isn’t just the letters,” he says. “If only it were that, I would not run. Disgrace I have no fear of, and you've told me to be disliked is no shame. but there are – threats.” Enjolras takes a breath, then two, and looks up at her from behind his big mug of coffee, and his eyes are asking questions her heart can’t answer and his hands speak a nervous, fluttering language she does not understand and she finds herself a stranger to his anxiety and his fears. For as long as she’s known him – and admittedly it hasn’t been very long – he’s been wrong, but at least he’s always been wrong with gusto, with confidence that is now finite in his fearful eyes.

(There is no comfort, she thinks sardonically, in being held in trust if he does it to soften a blow he knows is deadly. Bullet holes are rarely closed with kindness, after all.)

“There are threats towards everyone (lashes lowered, fingers laced), but mostly they’re directed towards –”

“Me,” she finishes for him. It’s no surprise, no wonder why they target her, the little upstart from the underside of their unchallenged utopia, only she feels sick to the bones, and there’s a shrill piercing drone that settles in the back of her mind because _whydidn’tyouexpectthis_ and _howcouldyouletyourguarddown_ and _didyourmotherteachyounothing_.

It’s been so long (too long) since last she let down her guard, too long since she’s been wheedled into trusting and this – whatever this is – feels close to betrayal.

He takes another stack of paper from his briefcase and slides it carefully across to her, making certain that he keeps eye contact. “I wasn’t sure how to approach you on the subject,” he says in a voice as delicate as the caramelised glaze of a deconstructed pastry. He’s stepping on thin ice around her and she hates it. Respect demands not delicacy, but the trust enough for frankness.

“And it probably would have been more comforting to have Combeferre here, or Courf – they’re better at these things and I'm not – well – the greatest in the world at – connecting but – I got you involved in this and this should be my responsibility.” He plows through with all the tenacity of a little engine that had bowed to the fact that it couldn’t but was going to die trying anyway. “Of course I’d rather you stay, but I’d understand it if you don’t –” there is a pregnant pause, as if he’s expecting some sort of reaction from her but she is staring at the pile before her.

“No.“

“What?”

She raises her head so she’s level with his gaze. “Enjolras, you didn’t get me involved. Don’t give yourself too much credit. I made that decision myself; I'm the reason I’m involved. And I know my limits, pinky swear.” She pushes the papers back towards him and sinks back into her seat, cradling to herself the lukewarm comfort of weak coffee.

He smiles, though the smile is more concession than compromise, but leaves the letters on the table for her to take. If she doesn’t want to read them it’s her decision, he’s quick to explain when she shoots him a questioning glance, but if she changes her mind he doesn’t want her to have to go through the trouble of having to ask him. Which admittedly, she appreciates, though she hadn’t thought he had it in him to consider that.

“In any case, I intend to enjoy myself,” she informs him. “The stars are out, the sun’s just set, I've done something I never thought that I could do in a million years, and I have a handsome politician man drinking coffee with me.”

(He sputters, she laughs. Surely he must know how beautiful he is.)

She’s quick to jump on the opportunity to have a little fun with the young man who takes himself much too seriously. “What shall we do next?” she teases. “A romantic walk by the Seine? Shall we confess our life stories to each other?”

“If you want.”

Fool, she thinks, but she doesn't know if she means him or her. “Better we don’t.” And she wiggles all five inches of heel at him. “Walking in heels is dangerous business, you know." The shoes are her pride and joy, but they aren’t made with walking in mind. “You can buy me ice cream,” she suggests, and she is surprised when he agrees, finishing off the last of  his coffee and wiping down the table with a napkin (made from recycled sugarcane, they boast in green ink).

Which is of course how they end up on a bench along the banks of the Seine, two scoops of strawberry shortcake on a waffle cone in her hand and a single scoop of plain vanilla in a little tub with chocolate syrup in a separate container in both of his. The river runs serpentine through the belly of the body of the metropolis, its softly lapping waves murky as they break against the solid stone. The sky is a bluer reflection of the water, clouds stippling the sky and hiding what stars would have shown their shy faces to the city of lights that are so bright as to outshine heaven. She’s leaning back against the seat, resting the curve of her neck against the top of the bench. The wood digs into her flesh in a way that hurts, but it’s a good kind of pain, the kind that lets her know she’s real, she’s here, she has a physical presence and a physical manifestation and her existence is not dependent on the acknowledgement of other physical entities, that she can exist without their notice. (She is real, if they see her or not.)

Eponine pushes tired fingers through hair that today shines dark like obsidian and runs in graceful little ripples of India ink down the back of the seat and her tongue reaches out to savour the cream that is so cold her heart feels frozen, even in this heat. And she contemplates the people who did not leave their imprint on the earth, the people who slip away, who cease to exist because no one is alive to recall they were ever real to begin with. Do they have shadows? Do they have souls? Or are the only people who can live beyond death the kind immortalised between the leaves of an old book?

Enjolras is the one to break a silence for a change. “What did you dream of being, when you were a kid?”

“Well, let’s see. First I wanted to be a princess. Then a ballerina. then, for some reason, a chef. A fancy French sous chef – lord, how stereotypical. Then when i was twelve I had decided I wanted to be a fashion designer, but my dad got fired from his cabbie gig and I dropped out of – stopped going to, really – school to get paid. Then I started dreaming about my brothers, the ones my mom gave up.”

“That doesn’t sound like so bad a solution to me,” Enjolras says, and she knows now he means well, but it doesn’t stop her from reaching across the space between them (it’s tangible; if she were to block them out she’d block them out with negative space, because the air between feels more full of energy than their bodies combined) to smack him lightly across the arm.

“God, you’re so – _you_ ,” she says, but it's without real bite. “You like to think you’re so revolutionary but you’ll swallow every half-assed lie you're fed. You really think adoption is all peaches and roses?”

He’s still confused. Eponine leans back again, tilting her head to greet the stars. “I'll forward you some articles later,” she promises. “Right now I’m lighter than air and don’t mean to be pulled back down to earth. What about you? Did you dream of being a corrupt servant of the public interest when you were but a babe of seven or nine?”

“I–?” he’s laughing. “You mean I didn’t just pop out full grown from my mother, clothed in a suit and cloaked in corruption?”

“Ah, so you can joke! It’s not a very good one, though.”

“Underscoring my point that I should never make them.”

“ _Ha_.” It is not a laugh.

Enjolras thinks, absentmindedly spooning chocolate-covered vanilla into his mouth. What a funny picture they make! she thinks to herself. He’s dressed down for once, in a red sweatshirt and neat jeans and loafers (loafers!), but he is still poised, elegant as a swan skimming across the pond in the Château de Versailles, all gilded and golden. Still starched crisply clean, still all sharp corners and rigid space. He eats his ice cream in a container, holds it with a napkin, carefully separating himself from the things he touches, keeps his syrup and his ice cream apart.

And she’s fancy for once, in someone else’s clothes, but she flows like the river, one thing swooning into the next in a dizzy dance of the cacophony at which she so excelled. She is circular where he is square, she eats strawberry shortcake ice cream sprinkled with the shimmer of stars in a waffle cone, the cream coursing through crevices in her cold hand. She is loose where he is tight, unraveling where he is pulled together.

Eponine has to keep her shoulders from shaking with laughter. What strange course of fate has brought two such dissimilar people to the same park bench in Paris at sundown?

“I wanted to be a photographer when I was younger,” he says, and she bursts out laughing while he gazes at her in surprise because whatever she’d expected, it isn’t this.

“A photographer?”

“Does it shock you?” he looks incredibly amused by the idea that anything about him can shock her.

“Yes – well, no.” It’s surprising given his present career, but not to strange considering what she knows of he who always requires a separation between himself and others, who observes but never interacts, who can place others into contexts he couldn’t put himself into – not much, apparently, has changed. “I was just wondering how an aspiring photographer managed to turn himself into a politician.”

Enjolras shrugs noncommittally. For someone so passionate and sure of the world, he’s so vague about his person. “It was a long and winding road towards the realisation that photojournalism is very much ingrained in imperialistic pursuits and the exploitation of its subjects.”

“The difference between that and politics is–?”

“Non-interference. At least in politics I can actively try and make the world less of a shitty place. At least I must take action. Not that,” he grimaces, “Politicians don’t actively try and make things worse sometimes, myself included.”

Eponine finishes off the last of her ice cream and grins appreciatively at him.

—

He drops her back home with five minutes left until her shift at the bar starts and she flutters her fingers at him, standing atop the stairs like a debutante as he descends and she finally lets out a breath and sinks to the ground. Her tailbone digs into the cold cement and she pushes sticky fingers across skin that is dark as a moonless night, digging the heels of her hands deep into her eye sockets as she tries to prevent the tears from eking out.

It’s been a long day, she tells herself, and contemplates calling in sick as she distracts herself from the reason behind her upset. Mostly, though, she’s tired. And there’s a sense of weight about her, as if there’s an anchor tied to each of her limbs and she’s been cast adrift in the endless sea. And she wishes she could stop, because the ocean is crushing her. But her mind has drifted back to the letters sitting unopened at the bottom of her purse. (She can fool him, she can fool the world, but clever is the fool who can fool herself, and Eponine has always known her dark corners too well to be tricked by mirages and facades.)

It seems, though, that night brings subtle graces because not two minutes later she feels someone graze her freckled shoulder. Eponine lifts her head, mouth opened to snap _go run away to my father, Montparnasse, I’m not in the mood tonight_ before she realises the hair is yellow and not raven, the skin is tanned and not deathly pale.

“You left your wallet,” he says by way of explanation, and sinks onto the ground next to her, sitting at once too close and too far for comfort.

And she finds that Enjolras’ presence _is_ comfortable – more so than the boy next door’s, with his earnest face and his frank eyes, more so than Montparnasse’s, who she’s known for years. There’s no expectation of speech between them, no words dangling on lips, no need to express the things that are bubbling up inside of her. (She is a volcano, on the verge of eruption, and the lava will bury them both.)

They sit in silence for what seems like hours in a symphony of oppositional forces – he’s still as a statue, she’s twisting her fingers into pretzels; he’s looking straight at her, she’s looking desperately away; he’s observing, she’s performing.

“Should I call you in sick?” he asks, softly, because he feels guilty for handing the threats to her.

“Yes,” she says, because she is heartsick and on edge and he is there. Eponine hands him her cellphone and watches as he navigates the outdated system to call the bar.

Enjolras’ voice is a low thrum, like a lullaby that she likes to hear, and she thinks about how nice it is to be looked after. To have things done for her, to not to have to do things for herself. Eponine tilts her head to regard him openly. She watches as his lips form around the words he’s saying, she watches as his eyelids flutter, the column of his throat as he swallows, and the strain of his wrists as he snaps her phone closed.

“Do you want me to stay with you?” he asks.

“I’m good,” she says, but it’s yes please that’s coming out. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugs. “I offered. and in any case, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have made you feel unsafe.”

“You didn’t make me feel unsafe,” she says, taking his proffered hand and letting him haul her up. “They made me feel unsafe. And I should be stronger than this, anyway.”

He huffs. “You know what it is about you that I absolutely hate, Eponine? It’s this belief that somehow you have to be constantly strong. You can let yourself be vulnerable sometimes. and maybe people have flaked on you before and maybe there was no one around but – that’s different now, isn’t it?”

That’s just it, isn’t it? she’s hit upon the secret of his tolerability. No, more than tolerability. He cares about his friends. He makes her believe in innocence. He makes her feel at ease, because no matter what it is she takes issue with, he will listen, and give it fair consideration, rebut if necessary, but he's never up in arms and combative and – she can appreciate that.

That night they burn the letters with the cool night air kissing their faces and the moon showering them in a hazy glow that makes Eponine doubt her own reality as she watches him carefully light the first piece of paper on fire and throw it into her old tin trashcan. They do it in measures, by turns, and there’s a sort of music to the way she’s burning up her fear with her old pink lighter and he’s burning away his doubt with his antique silver one.

Before the glow has left the embers, she falls asleep on his shoulder with a look of ease more natural than the one she sported before. And even if it’s not advisable and not safe and he probably should have gotten a glass of water to dump on the still-flickering flame (and he would have, too, if he was sure he wouldn’t wake her), he finds himself dozing lightly, his cheek pressed against her hair, breathing in a mist of cigarette flame and sandalwood.

* * *

_can burst joy’s grape against his palate fine;_

* * *

**viii.**

He comes round near every day now, mostly because Project Saint-Michel is really kicking off and he wants to be around to supervise. She supervises as well, but where she threads through the people and wanders in and out of stores, striking up casual conversation with the residents around Place Saint-Michel about the quality of the lecturers they’ve managed to secure, the reliability of the babysitters, he stands back with the other organisers, smiling awkwardly when someone comes up to address him.

Saturdays are reserved for classes in one of the old convention centres. He isn’t obligated to come, not really – there are, she is sure, city laws to be passed, and the program they’ve crafted is more or less self-sustaining – but he comes, anyway.

They fall into a pattern, rhythmic and regular and maybe a little strange. She remembers to stock up on coffee from the corner store, he replaces her chipped cup with one of his own, and more often than not he finds himself parked on her old (she calls it “vintage” when she doesn’t feel like being honest) sofa, long legs stretched out in front of him while she talks animatedly on the coffee table in front of him. He’s never seen someone get so passionate about _Sound of Music_ before.

“You need a break,” she comments one day as she’s pouring him coffee and he’s taking up space in her living room.

“Well, that makes two of us, then,” he’s quick to say, accepting the mug offered to him.

“Been busy,” she says evasively, settling in on the couch next to him and arching to lean her head back against his shoulder. Some of her hair, which smells like her desperately, achingly, horribly tantalising perfume mixed with aroma of instant coffee, has escaped her ponytail and grazes against his collarbone. (He shivers, but does not move away.)

“And what have you been doing, little politician man, that’s got you looking more like a panda than a person?” she questions.

He echoes her sentiment. “Been busy.”

Eponine snorts. “Yes, I’m sure you’ve been very busy _not_ passing laws and _not_ moving forward and _not_ enacting change. Must take so much time and energy.”

“Don’t be a smartass, Eponine,” Enjolras says primly through pursed lips, but he scrunches his nose at her, screwing his handsome face up into a cartoonishly exaggerated expression, to which she responds by laughing so hard she slips from his shoulder to his lap and he holds awkwardly still not only because this is unprofessional (though he likes to think they could be called friends, the sort of friends who can do this kind of thing and engage in this sort of intimacy), but also because her laughter is like champagne, all light and airy and bubbly and he’s not sure if he wants to drown in the folds of the ripples of her amusement or drink deeply from its well.

“Don’t do that again,” she gasps, a wide grin resting easy on her face, looking up at his carefully arranged expression of stoicism. “It doesn’t suit you.” But he thinks he might, because she looks so glorious laughing.

When he leaves, though, the grin leaves with him, wilts like a plum blossom caught unawares by a late winter’s chill. Enjolras says he has to go look after some televised interview Courfeyrac’s giving. She’s the most magnetic of their group, and her warm, friendly smile makes for good PR (according to Bahorel, at lest). Which would be great if Courf weren’t also prone to not, perhaps, taking things as seriously as she ought, and if Enjolras wasn’t prone to, perhaps, being an overbearing worrier with the incessant need to drill questions fifty times before an interview.

And Eponine accepts this because she understands the necessity, but she can’t help but to feel left, again and again and again – especially today. Eponine pushes herself up from where she’s lying like an effigy on a tomb, bathing herself in the crisp, clean linen smell he’s left behind again and walks to the kitchen and walks past the note half-opened that lies on the kitchen counter and most definitively does not look at the words that read, like an ugly red gash across an expanse of pale skin –

_Stop it now, or trust that I'll make you._

signed –

Papa.

Like father, like daughter, isn't that what they said? God, there has to be beer somewhere in the house.

—

When the sun has swooned past the mountains and the stars have taken their places on the stage of the sky, Enjolras swings by her apartment again, a pile of papers under his arm, ready to be dropped off. The first time he’d come over with documents filled to the brim with legal drivel, he hadn’t expected her to be so diligent her her assessment of the papers, and he’d stayed up with her until well past midnight, explaining all the things she didn’t understand. If only everyone were so eager to push through mountains of paperwork.

Enjolras has come prepared this time, though – bags of takeout jollily swinging on his wrists and a slushie in the hand not occupied with papers. There’s a muffled roar streaming through the thin walls of her dilapidated apartment, and even though he shouldn’t be as worried as he is (odd sounds are far from strangers in her building), he quickens his pace as he ascends the stairs.

There’s a key tucked into a particularly deep crack behind a knitted kitten hanging next to her door. He lets himself in with it, making sure to stick it back into its spot once he hears the lock click open.

All the lights are on, flooding the room with an artificial glow, and the windows are flung open, curtains twisting around each other in an attempt to waltz in the wind that comes blowing in, and for half a second he’s convinced that she’s been robbed because there are clothes and books and CDs flung everywhere. Until he sees her, standing like Queen Mab amidst the chaos. Her hair is loose and wild, her head tilted back, and she blinks to the rhythm of the music that courses through the air with all the physicality of solid form.

“Shut the door behind you,” she slurs, and he does just that, shooting a look towards the bottle of beer clutched loosely in her left hand (her right hand is counting constellations he can’t see) and the several that are littered on the floor and between the cushions of the sofa.

“You’re drunk.”

“Hello to you too, stranger,” Eponine drawls, curling her slender toes around the neck of a bottle and testing her weight on it. He’s caught between staying back lest she lose her balance should he make any sudden move and rushing forward in case the bottle breaks and she ends up with glass embedded in the sole of her foot. Eponine solves this problem for him by stepping off of it and staggering over to him instead, looping both her arms around his neck as she trips on the carpet and sags against him.

He’s quick to drop his papers down on the couch and reach to steady her, one hand mimicking the curve of her elbow and the other moving to shadow her waist, but Eponine has all the dexterity of a tightrope walker and she regains her balance soon enough, even if she remains pressed up against him, her shirt bunching against his stomach and her lips hovering a whisper from his own.

“You’re drunk,” Enjolras says again, as he tries to put some distance between them, straining back even as his body urges him forward.

“Where could you have possibly gotten that idea?” she laughs, but there’s a sharp shrill edge to her voice, like she’s living on the edge of a blade and she’s slipping.

“Oh, I don’t know.” He fights to keep his tone light and under control. (She is drunk, he says to himself. She is drunk and she does not mean to do this and her judgement is more than impaired.) “The not one, not two, not three – four – five – but _six_ empty or half empty bottles in this room, the music – which you really should turn off, by the way, someone could call the police for this – or enough alcohol on your breath to inebriate anyone within arm’s length.”

She giggles a furious giggle. “Well?”

“What?”

“You’re less than an arm’s length away from me. Are you inebriated, by any chance? By the beer? By my presence?”

“I’m not so sure I’m not,” he admits, lulled by the security of her unfocused gaze and the inscrutable Cheshire grin she hangs on her face, because surely she won’t remember come tomorrow. “But I’m also sure you are, so we need to get you into bed.” She makes weak protest when he removes her arms from around him and steps over the small mountain of junk she’s dumped onto the floor.

“If you still have anything to say to me,” he says as he leads her towards her bedroom, which is really nothing more than a large closet with a bed in the corner, “tell it to me tomorrow when you’re sure of what you want and can remember what you're doing.”

“Mmm,” she groans, but gives no other indication that she hears what he has said as she burrows herself deep under the blankets.

Eponine looks at peace in sleep, calm in a way she never is at any other time. (Still, it’s better not to poke even a sleeping dragon.) He goes from her room as quietly as he’s able after cracking the one window in the room open to as wide as it will go (which is not very wide at all) so that whatever breeze comes might wash over her and wipe away the sweat that’s beading on her brow. (It’s sinfully hot in her apartment, he tells himself, and that is all.)

He makes a beeline to her boombox, which is so old he can’t even remember how the controls work. That’s solved when he yanks the cord from the outlet. The silence is more startling than the sound, the stillness ringing in his ears. Enjolras had had, it must be said, higher hopes for the night than to clean up Eponine’s house. But there are worse ways to spend an evening.

Enjolras scoops up trash by the handful to dump into the garbage can and reorganises her CDs for her (she had them sorted by year, then band in alphabetical order, which he has always maintained was an ineffective and time-wasting method when you can sort them by band in alphabetical order, then by album in order of year) and collects her recyclables, lining the glass bottles into a little regiment by the door. The room is nearly clean again when he notices the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from under the couch.

It comes free with a little tug. The paper is smooth, and Enjolras would suspect that she hasn’t read it yet except that the creases are heavily distressed, as if she’s run her fingernails over them multiple times, a nervous tic of hers. He flips it over.

The writing is neat, but boxy, and it is torn through in places where the author pressed down so hard they’ve broken through the surface. He shouldn’t, really; this is clearly personal and something she feels deeply about, given the extent of her intoxication, but his curiosity outweighs any misgivings he might have. And she’d never tell him on her own, anyway. For a girl who talks so often, she’s careful not to say much.

So he skims it. 

Enjolras leans back against the couch with a heavy sigh and an even heavier heart, and tosses the letter onto the low table before him. He’s had some clue of the state of her family life, which is to say he’s always had an unconfirmed feeling it’s bad, given that it’s the one subject she keeps her mouth adamantly shut against, but he hasn’t before realised to what extent the enmity courses. The letter, though, lays it out plain and clear – Thenardier has little regard for the well-being of the girl he’s raised, except where her existence might benefit him, and several pieces of the puzzle that is Eponine (“You can’t solve a person,” he hears Combeferre say in the back of his mind) fall into place.

She’s a runaway, apparently having ‘abandoned the loving parents who gave her life and breath,’ or so it is postulated, and she’s cut contact with him except through a man he calls Montparnasse. She has a younger brother named Gavroche, who’s also run from home from multiple occasions and over whom, it’s evident, Eponine is trying to gain custody. It’s filled with vague threats that linger behind the forms of his words, fighting to keep from taking the letter over with its vitriol. No wonder she had reacted so strongly to the threats before.

 _What a state of things_ , is his last thought before he slips into sleep.

* * *

 _his soul shalt taste the sadness of her might_ ,

* * *

**ix.**

She claws her way out of bed the next morning through a headache that feels rather like someone’s playing an amplified bass in the back chamber of her brain. It’s not pleasant, but she can’t say she’s not used to it by now.

The morning air is brisk on her skin, raising gooseflesh on her arms and down her belly as she stands face to face with the sun. Eponine groans as she leans to pick up yesterday’s clothes and shuffles over to the full-length mirror on the far wall.

 _I look like shit_ , she decides, swinging a sweatshirt over her shoulders and wiggling into a pair of capris and heading towards the door so she can make herself a cup of coffee. and then almost falls over screaming.

Three observations:

  1. The room is clean. The room was not clean when she left it.

  2. Someone’s left the windows open. Even at her most inebriated, Eponine would never have left the windows open, because thieves are common and the night’s a lovely muffle for the sound of broken laws.

  3. There’s a blond guy sleeping against the couch with his face towards the ceiling and his mouth open wide to invite along flies and blackmail pictures.




She doesn’t even question it anymore, especially not when she sees the huge pile of papers next to him. Eponine tiptoes closer to Enjolras and nudges him with one bare foot before swooping down and slipping his phone from his pocket. His passcode is ridiculously easy to get past (0714 for Bastille Day) and he has a horrid taste in games (a bunch of mind and strategy games; not even a simple Temple Run or anything) but the photographs are taken, the background is set, and both her email and his contain three files of Enjolras looking marvelously ridiculous, and she’s six steps on the way to complete amusement even through her hangover before she notices what’s on the table in front of him.

And then she’s a whirlwind of agitation, her fingers digging into his bone as she shakes him awake and he gasps in the wake of her imposed physicality and the marks she makes on his skin, and it takes two seconds of confusion before his guilt catches up to him and he knows what all this is about and he looks into her wet black eyes to find worse than anger – betrayal and hurt and frustration caught up in one breathless choke.

“You read it,” she says, and she doesn’t sound incensed the way he expects her to be and maybe it’s the alcohol from the night before but she sounds tired in a way that grinds him to dust.

“I did.” And he doesn’t try to hide it, which is one mark in his favour at least. He just sits on her grimy floor, one hand picking at the spot where one of her floorboards had come a little loose, squinting up at her with eyes still dulled by the shadow of sleep.

Eponine swallows, and it is as if she has shoved a handful of rocks down her throat, and they scrape and bump and chafe on their way down, crushing her ephemeral words under their weight. “Can I – ask why?”

 _You can always ask anything of me_ , Enjolras thinks, and feels as if something has shifted between them in the interim between last night and this morning, as if they have crossed some rapid-running river and are now regarding it from the reprieve of a solid shoreline, except that he doesn’t know where he stands. “You weren’t ever going to tell me yourself, you know. You would have never admitted you need help.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Is that such a hard thing to admit?” His words are hard but his tone is gentle, sanding down the sharp edges of the consonants he can, with a shift of posture or expression, turn into weapons, so that they don’t cut the girl who has been cut too often and too deeply. “You can admit that other people need help. you can admit it’s no failure on their part then. And sometimes, you even go out of your way to help them – after you’ve thrown an egg at their heads, maybe, but you do. And I admit that I was wrong to pry and that there are lines that I’ve crossed that I should never have crossed, and I am sorry. but – is it really so hard to apply that to yourself? You’re not weaker for needing other people, you know.”

“It feels like a weakness. It feels like dependency, and I have always done things on my own.” Eponine turns her head from him so that he cannot see her face, but he catches the too-bright mirror-shine in her eyes that herald a coming rain and he pushes himself up to walk before her with his hands extended, unsure if his touch would be a help or a harm. To his surprise, she leans her forehead – only her forehead – against his shoulder and he can feel the warm wetness of tears staining the crumpled canvas of his button-down.

(Cry a good cry, and let the salt water wash it all away, and from it you shall be born anew.)

“You’re allowed to be weak,” he whispers into her hair, hands finding a place to settle in the juncture where neck meets collarbone. “No one could ask constant strength from you.”

“The world does,” she says, and it’s bitter like an orange rind, flavoured with too many years of solitude. “Every day.”

“Then I will change the world for you,” he replies, and pretends not to notice when her arms snake around his waist and she presses her mouth against a shoulder in what could be called a kiss but is far more likely an effort to stifle the sob that comes tearing out of her a moment later.

That’s how they stand, surrounded by a thousand and one particles of scattered dust held suspended in the streams of sunlight that come pouring into her living room, until her tears subside and her headache worsens and he walks barefoot to the kitchen to make tea for her.

“It’s not my father’s fault, you know,” she tells him when noon finds her hair draped across his shoulders and his fingers tracing circles onto the small of her back where she tells him she wants a tattoo. “Or – I guess it is his fault, but I don’t think I blame him for it––not anymore, anyway, now that I don't have to live with him anymore. It’s been very hard. Stressful. to move from a world where you are an innkeep, and respected in that capacity, to one where you are a cab driver, and looked down upon, and when the economy took a downturn, not even that. He’s never cared much for us, not really, but it was harder to hide that when you have nothing to hide behind.”

“That’s not an excuse,” Enjolras starts.

“And this isn't forgiveness, but it’s an understanding. I don’t hate my father because I could so easily become him. So easily. But I have to get my brother out of there. Do you understand?”

“I'll try,” he says, because he thinks there's no redemption to be found in the heart of a man who would so treat his own family.

There is a little pause, long enough for the last page of one chapter to melt into the first page of a new one and then she’s looking into his eyes as she moves closer and presses her lips with the deliberation of utter control upon his. (He’s not surprised, not if he were really honest with himself. It feels like they have fallen into this moment as if they have been satellites on a course set to inevitable collision, but the collision is gentle and it tastes of cherries and leaves him feeling like the cool breath of a spring breeze.) He leans into her, cradles her hair, and thinks of the colour yellow.

“I might need help,” she finally admits when they put more than shared air between themselves again.

“You’re in luck then,” Enjolras says, “Because I happen to be a sterling lawyer with an impressive legal team who's promised to find some way to compensate you.”

* * *

_and be among her cloudy trophies hung._

* * *

**x.**

How shall we say this story ends? We’ll say it doesn’t, because lives aren't so cleanly configured. Rather, they’re twisting strands of interpersonal interaction that wind down towards no one particular goal or destination. You can meet her here and lose her later, or let him go and find him again. Pressing pause and calling it an ending would be a disservice to the richness of lives led even after they are divorced from our knowing.

So say instead that Eponine went to court, and found all she wanted there. 

Say instead that Enjolras did not change the world overnight, but did what he could.

Say instead that Eponine finally found for herself more than one companion, one friend (and took immense pleasure in introducing her oldest, dearest friend to her cute next door neighbour and watching Cosette pale as Marius reddened).

Say instead that Enjolras’ reputation never quite got over having an egg thrown at it, but he was happy with the way things turned out, anyway.

Say instead that they kissed again, and again, and again.

Say that the two of them fared as well as any two people can be expected to fare. She could be pigheaded and he could be thoughtless, and they were two hotheaded young fools, but they were a work in progress, and that was okay. Because she always tasted of cherries and he always smelled of sunshine, and they will always have met because he was an asshole and she bought eggs at the supermarket that day.

(It could have been worse. It could have been tomatoes.)

**Author's Note:**

> * lol I mean America. You know I mean America. Like LBR this is America displaced onto France. Sorry, France.


End file.
